5/21/2009 @ 5:20PM

How To Forage For Springtime Food

At 10 P.M., after a full day spent tramping through woods and waters, we are desperate. We failed to get a fish. We didn’t even see a turkey. And that squirrel? I missed it with a spear by a good 30 feet.

Now it all comes down to the frogs.

So Tom Valenti and I don our waders, grab a flashlight and ease into the inky Beaverkill River. There’s an unsettling splash in the riffle behind us. The trees on the bank groan. Darkness makes the river’s noises more fraught with meaning.

“There’s one,” I whisper. Valenti splashes up beside me and gazes down at a warty amphibian on the bank. “Dude, that’s a toad,” he says. “Look for more green.”

We finally find a true frog, a cute little bugger sitting in the mud. I grab him. Within an hour we have enough frogs’ legs to form the centerpiece of our meal.

The idea was to spend two spring days 120 miles northwest of New York City in the Catskill Mountains, gathering and preparing, then cooking and eating, a first-rate meal of wild food. Joining me on this quest for haute cuisine sauvage was Valenti, the chef-owner of Ouest and the West Branch, both on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Valenti, 50, learned to cook “simple peasant Italian dishes” from his grandmother in Ithaca, N.Y. As a teenager he worked as a private chef for a wealthy couple in Harrison, N.Y. In the early 1980s he apprenticed in Paris for Michelin three-star chef Guy Savoy, known for simple fresh dishes. Valenti has published three well-received cookbooks, the latest about recipes for diabetics (Valenti has type 2 diabetes).

Valenti has owned a fishing cabin on the Beaverkill for 20 years. This part of the Catskills–rolling green mountains sluiced with cold, clear streams and rivers–lacks the cachet of Dutchess County’s civilized country living and the mansions inhabited by the upwardly mobile in the Hamptons, but that suits Valenti just fine. It’s wild and simple, its denizens mostly farmers and bluestonequarry workers.

Wilderness-wise locals have taught Valenti much about his “foodshed.” They include Ray Turner, 61, a bearded, hermetic eel trapper who has lived in a hollow on the East Branch of the Delaware River for 40 years. His advice: The cattails should be ready, but mushrooms would be hard to find. Some 15 miles upriver, Roger and Candyce Ricco, 59 and 60, respectively, are master foragers of ramps (spring onions), fiddleheads (the unfurled frond of a fern), strawberries, milkweed, pigweed and sap for maple syrup, mostly gathered on land that’s been in their family for 200 years.

A word to those ready to gas up the car: Before setting out on a hunt for wild food, you should map out public lands and avoid private property, unless permission has been granted or you don’t mind having a .22 pointed in your direction. Also, know your plants and animals (Peterson Field Guides are invaluable), especially when it comes to fungi. One cap of the well-named Destroying Angel mushroom (Amanita virosa), abundant in the spring, can kill you.

Our first stop: the side of Highway 17 near the town of Fishs Eddy. There Valenti stepped in a small swampy trough, brushed aside a Doritos wrapper and pulled up a young cattail. He was after the fleshy white shoot, whose mild taste makes it excellent raw, cooked or even pickled. We filled a small plastic bag with them.

Valenti pointed to a nearby shrub with conically shaped fruit, which looked like clusters of small red BBs. “Sumac!” he yelled joyfully. I raised an eyebrow. “Not the poisonous kind,” he said. Valenti picked off a few of the drupes, which we would dry, then mash into a fine grain that has a tangy, lemony taste. “I sprinkle this on tuna steaks at my restaurants,” he told me.

The nearby Beaverkill provided fiddleheads, a delicacy found close to riverbeds in the Northeast and Midwest and used in salads or cooked like asparagus. We harvested the quarter-size heads that had just poked out from the soil. In 20 minutes we had a bagful.

Then we headed a few miles down the road to a spot near the convergence of the east and west branches of the Delaware River. Over a ridge on a floodplain hundreds of low-to-the-ground green leaves swayed in a breeze filled with the sharp oniony odor of ramps. Valenti said the broader the leaves, the better the ramp, whose little white bulbs resemble small leeks. We dug out a few dozen. Ramps have yet to be tamed by farmers, so Valenti buys them for Ouest from a Catskills dweller who picks them wild.

Fungi proved a more difficult find. The weather had been unseasonably hot and dry, not ideal for mushrooms. The early season morels and chanterelles we sought needed just the right combination of spring warmth and rain, and that hadn’t happened yet.

Our forage began to wind down in the late afternoon. We found a natural spring and filled three bottles with the frigid water, then headed back to Valenti’s cabin, where we picked a sprig of mint for the water and some leaves from one of the most despised plants in the U.S.: the dandelion. The “rocket” was bitter when eaten raw, but Valenti promised that after a good soak in some cold water the harshness would subside.

That left us lacking only protein. I grabbed an atlatl, an ancient Native American weapon comprising a foot-and-a-halflong wooden holder on which one mounts a spear. I took a dozen practice tosses, then set off in the woods as Valenti went inside to wash the vegetables. One rambling hour and a missed squirrel later, we turned to our fly rods. Both Valenti and I are strict practitioners of catch-and-release when it comes to trout, but we decided to break our rule only if we caught a fish stocked by the state (sometimes you can tell when the adipose fin is clipped).

At dusk on the river there was a hatch of the mayfly known as the Hendrickson. Valenti saw the ring of a rising trout and cast his imitation to it. The trout took the fly and raced downstream. It turned out to be a female brown trout, nearly 2 feet long, far too big and beautiful to kill. Until nightfall we tried in vain to catch a stocked trout, which led us to the frogs.

At 11 p.m., frogs in hand, we ended our hunting and gathering. Valenti’s preparation of the feast the next day began with cleaning and slicing the vegetables. He laid a bed of fiddleheads on two pieces of tinfoil and placed the cattails and ramps on the side, then placed the skinned frogs’ legs on top. He put a tablespoon of butter on top of each dish, closed each and put them on his outdoor grill. “I have no idea how this is going to turn out,” Valenti said.

Over the meal Valenti said that foraging was a bit like being a chef-owner of a restaurant, where creativity happens within confines. In the restaurant business that confine is cost. He mentioned braised beef short ribs, a popular menu item for years. Recently the price of the beef had spiked, which left him with a choice: raise the price, drop the item or figure out some other way to present it. He opted for the latter, developing gnocchi with chunks of short ribs.

In the end we had probably burned more calories gathering the food than we gained by eating it. Consider that a benefit. To paraphrase Euell Gibbons, the late author of the seminal foraging book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, our meal told a story.

Grub Grab

Ten cross-country spots boasting the finest wild food

Can’t make it to the Catskills? There are plenty of places nationwide to spend a day–or even a weekend–foraging your next meal. Go to forbes.com/forage for an interactive guide to the best regions in the U.S. to search for such wild things as fiddleheads, wild blueberries, bluegills, morel and feral swine. (No swine flu yet in the feral version, but they can carry diseases, like all wild animals.)